The Death of a Healer — from Cull of Personality

NOTE: this is the second chapter of my book, Cull of Personality. The book builds on themes that this chapter opens with, so, as it is a book and this is how books work, the chapter alone is an excerpt and its larger context is the entire book.
The book is available in real and electronic version at blackandgreenpress.org

Every last passenger pigeon, of a population of birds that once blackened the skies, was killed by a people who do not find in themselves the necessity to think about the relationship of pigeons to man, the future, the land.

-John Mohawk, ‘In Search of Noble Ancestors’[i]

Sebastian Woodroffe, we are meant to believe, had good intentions. Honorable even.

At the very least, he is largely given the benefit of the doubt. That is, to the world outside of the village where he died: Victoria Garcia, Peru. There, his remains are much less significant than those of Maestra Olivia Arévalo.

And rightfully so.

At 81, Arévalo’s reputation as a healer had outgrown the village where Woodroffe found her. If The Guardian is to be believed, she has been hailed as a “spiritual mother of the Shipibo-Konibo.”[ii] Her role as a respected Onanya, a plant medicine healer, was well known.

The Shipibo-Conibo are a complicated culture. Despite being the second largest tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, information is surprisingly hard to come by. But to understand why that is, it’s important to know the primary reason they erupted into the larger consciousness of a technologically infused and hyper-modernized world, then subsequently onto Woodroffe’s radar: ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca refers to a number of hallucinogenic brews made involving Banisteriopsis caapi, a native plant in the Amazon. The name is a Quechua word, meaning “the vine of souls.”[iii] There are a number of combinations made in making ayahuasca, but a common one uses the leaves of plants in the Psychotria genus. The brew contains the hallucinogenic compound dimethyltryptamine, DMT, released from the Psychotria, potentiated by Banisteriopsis.[iv] In the United States, DMT is a Schedule 1 narcotic. In Peru, it is legal.

It has also come to play an important part in the spiritual world of many Amazonian tribes.

Throughout the Amazonian region, a number of cultures treat it differently. Mixed with other plants, some use the bark in a cold-water infusion, some boil the bark and stems, in some places the fresh bark is chewed, and in others, a snuff is made. Some have no interest in it at all.

Not all methods are equally powerful, but ayahuasca is exceptionally potent. In all variations, “partakers often ‘experience’ death and the separation of body and soul.”[v] Boiling seems to produce the strongest results. But all forms are prone to violent and unpleasant aftereffects. Its consumption is followed by nausea and vomiting. Painful and discomforting, there’s little about experiencing death that should give any indication of being enjoyable.

The sickness, if doses are correct, should be followed by a pleasant euphoria paired with visual hallucinations. Taken in excess, the user is subjected to “frighteningly nightmarish visions” and “a feeling of extremely reckless abandon.” However, losing consciousness is rare and nothing inhibits movement.[vi]

So if you’re following along, then you may recognize that this can be a particularly dangerous combination. Nightmarish visions while the user is fully conscious and capable of movement.

It becomes immediately obvious why someone like Arévalo becomes so highly regarded. Ayahuasca, culturally speaking, is not a recreational thing. Its power is well known and respected, which is why its use can be so heavily shrouded in ritual. It’s also why having a time-tested healer like Arévalo is so important.

Ayahuasca, it should go without saying, is a part of a larger cultural context.

Unfortunately so is Peru.

In Victoria Garcia on April 19, 2018, that larger global context looked like Woodroffe. He drove his motorcycle to Arévalo’s home, carrying the .380 semi-automatic pistol that he bought off a police officer just over two weeks prior.

There, in the middle of the day, he shot Arévalo twice.

She died in the arms of her daughter.[vii]

* * * * *

Woodroffe, as he saw it, was in Peru to save lives.

His trips were covered in part by a Kickstarter campaign, parts of which now feel particularly ironic:

As old ideas meet the new, it is natural that they run into each other a little bit before melding and helping each other get stronger. I wish to be a part of this process, to make it happen.[viii]

They definitely ran into each other and he was unquestionably a part of that process. But the entirety of it is massive. That process is far larger and deeper than Woodroffe was likely ever to see, particularly while on ayahuasca.

Arévalo, however, had to have been far less shocked.

Woodroffe might have been her last encounter with soul-searching Westerners on the front-line of colonization, but he was definitely not her first.

Ayahuasca, as Woodroffe and others like him see it, is healing. Period.

Particularly, he believed, it could be extremely useful in overcoming addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He wasn’t alone in this. Arévalo’s name likely crossed his path because she was briefly employed by Temple of the Way of Light: a place that sounds like it was named by an online random cult name generator.

The Temple, located near Iquitos, Peru, specializes in Ayahuasca-based healing retreats. There, the much-vaunted healing powers of the vine are given the resort-casual variation. “Shamans” of the Shipibo are employed as guides. You can read about it in their promotional materials.

From 2009 to 2011, that included Arévalo.[ix]

According to their website, “healing retreats are intense, typically with deep insights and profound restoration taking place in a short amount of time.” Very efficient: very convenient. The Temple sits on 175 hectares of rain forest, features a permaculture center, a kitchen run on solar energy, and spring-fed drinking water. Lest the Western visitors be concerned, there is running water for showers, electricity, and 24-hour access to nearby medical facilities.

If you need further assurance, the Temple also won Retreat.guru’s “Safe Ayahuasca Retreat” Award in 2015, 2016, and 2017. I’m not sure what any of that is or even could be worth, but I would be remiss if I didn’t follow that up with a reminder that this is a real website and business. There are also apparently enough ayahuasca retreats to merit awards.

At the Temple, programs range from $2,100 to $2,950, from a 9-day stay up to an extensive 23-day retreat. The 23-day retreat is more drawn out, focused on a New Age grab bag of appropriated and mimicked practices, doused in a faux-spiritualism, featuring yoga, meditation, and art therapy. The 14-day program shifts a bit more into a different realm of the self-help world, adding “self-inquiry” to the ayahuasca, yoga, and meditation. This includes, in their words, “a comprehensive program of progressive therapeutic and Eastern psycho-spiritual practices.” The 11-day Alignment Intensive program mixes ayahuasca “with ontological inquiry.”[x] Again, these are their words.

It would be reassuring to say that the Temple is a one of a kind huckster scheme. It is far from it. I have no reason to believe that Woodroffe even knew of the Temple at all, or this Temple anyway. Ayahuasca retreats are far from a cottage industry in Peru, they’re a full-blown tourist destination. Thousands of Westerners go there annually to dip their psyche in the psycho-spiritual waters of “authentic” healing.

According to Retreat.guru, there are 241 retreat centers in Peru. Of those, it would appear that most of them specialize in ayahuasca. Each center tries to appear more appealing and some even more authentic than the others. If you’re looking for a shamanic apprentice program, but want to have your own catered room and be served vegan food, there’s an option for that. If you want to take part in a permaculture program and detox from your technology, there’s an option for that as well.

Which program Woodroffe took part in during his five years of traveling on and off in Peru really doesn’t matter. In the scheme of things, Woodroffe is hardly unique. In fact, it is in the lackluster aspects of Woodroffe’s trip that we see just how widespread and insidious the entirety of the ayahuasca-tourism industry really is.

He’s not even the only Westerner to die.

Over the last decade, eleven Westerners died in ayahuasca-related events in South America. You have some who died of complications in taking the drug itself — it is not uncommon for it to be mixed with other drugs — but you have murder as well. In 2015, a former Goldman Sachs analyst grabbed a knife during an ayahuasca ceremony and attacked a Canadian man. The Canadian acted in self-defense and the analyst died in the struggle. There’s that mix of nightmarish visions and uninhibited movement for you.

Despite all of this, the tourism industry keeps on growing.

Once the fascination of fringe-adventure journalists like those at Vice, celebrities of all stripes are singing praises of the healing powers of their ayahuasca retreats. Peru is becoming the destination of choice for high profile corporate pawns, much like that former Goldman Sachs analyst.[xi]

Woodroffe echoed all of that.

The problem is that it sounds, on the whole, pretty good. After having a run-in with addiction in his own family, Woodroffe was appalled by the dismal state of existing addiction recovery programs. And rightfully so: just not for reasons that Woodroffe was likely to ever understand.

Addiction and civilization go hand in hand.[xii]

The domestication process that is the core of a civilized existence is about disrupting our needs as social animals and channeling them back through a culture so bereft of meaning that we are willing to bite onto any meager alternative that we are sold. And there are many, including sipping on a vomit-inducing vine-based hallucinatory brew.

It is the consumptive nature of this late era of capitalism that convinces us that the piece of ourselves that we are missing, the one that keeps us constantly chasing after something, anything, is for sale. Most of us, we believe, just haven’t found it. Or we just can’t afford it. Yet.

The reality is that we are living in the hyper-technological, electronically emerged world of Progress that our parents and their parents dreamed of. That is a dream that they were sold. A dream they bought and worked for.

And it is a dream that offers no fulfillment.

We have everything at our disposal. That is, those of us with First World privileges. Yet depression continues to skyrocket. The opioid epidemic grows with no sign of slowing. The world feels like it’s burning and in our personalized technological feedback loops, we just keep feeding the fire.

What do you do? Medications are the short sell. People grind themselves down to pay for health insurance to cover the expenses related to the stress of not being able to afford it and physical decline comes along for the ride. We aren’t force fed garbage, but we overindulge in it as if we were. We live sedentary, isolated lives in a sea of untold radiation and toxins.

Perhaps it is most telling that every year since 2014 has seen a reduction of the average life expectancy among Americans. The fastest growing causes of death? Suicide, overdose, and accident. Increasingly, the Center for Disease Control is considering all three to be one category, and rightfully so. All three are linked in an overall and growing sense of disinterest in life that embraces the possibility of doing dangerous and potentially fatal things, often riding the line between passive and active suicide.[xiii]

There’s an unending list, but there’s no point in reciting it all here. Woodroffe, and many others like him, didn’t and don’t need to ask questions about whether or not depression and addiction were issues. Neither do I. Clearly they are. Clearly currently available solutions haven’t seemed to cure anyone or anything.

12-step programs, scale-down narcotics, recovery centers: Woodroffe knew these weren’t the solution. But in his mind, and apparently many others, the answer wasn’t in looking at the cause of the problems: it was in the programs.

The logic is simple. And simplistic.

It goes like this: there is a depth of knowledge, another plane of consciousness, which holds universal truths. Ayahuasca, as well as other hallucinogenic plants like it, grant us quicker access to that truth. They offer a magical mirror in which we can see both our problems and ourselves more clearly. We need to heal and this is a sacred path that we need to be taking.

For Woodroffe and his spiritual mentors, it’s not our circumstances, it’s our attitude: our approach.

We just need to see the bigger picture.

In the words of another one of ayahuasca’s promoters and a preacher of some kind of shamanic truth: “there are other ways, other practices that can be used to gain access to the knowledge and wisdom one gains from Ayahuasca but with the plants, it’s an accelerated curriculum, an accelerated course.”[xiv] Enlightenment fast tracked.

There’s a history to this thinking.

A romanticism that lives in The Yage Letters, a 1963 book collecting letters and writings exchanged between Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs. Yagé, another name given to ayahuasca, is the subject of travels and experimentation by the two notorious writers. They then upheld it for its world bending hallucinations.

That carries on into Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, published not long after. Seeking out the wholeness of a mythic Yaqui shaman and the spiritual oneness he holds. Oneness attained through the powers of peyote. Following soon after is Terrence McKenna and his reimagining of the world through the eyes of the hallucinogenic psilocybin mushroom.

To call this romanticism is to miss the point entirely.

It’s not just romantic: it’s reductionist.

This is the basis of an exploitive relationship. The cultural contexts all pushed aside, what that culture has are resources: an access point for mental liberation. A cure-all for depression, trauma, and addiction: one that doesn’t require any kind of validation other than a whimsical nostalgia for what Castaneda thought Don Juan would be thinking.

Literally fiction.

Beneath all of this is a faux-back-to-the-land mysticism. A product of a generation that was willing to do anything to shake the moral and political rigidity that lay before them. Typified by one of the loudest proponents of psychedelics, Timothy Leary, the praxis was to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

There was a boiling cauldron of unhinged “Native American” spirituality that was cartoonish at best, but racist in hindsight. They might have meant well, but the reactionary, liberated imaginations needed no grounding other than whatever its advocates believed they found on some other plane of consciousness.

Some got it, most didn’t.

Thomas King sums it up: Self-proclaimed hippies, flower children, and bums “made their way to reserves and reservations throughout North America, sure that Native peoples possessed the secret to life.” They sought out something they didn’t have.

What they found was poverty: “Or at least poverty was what they saw.”[xv]

Dismayed with native realities, they left. The mythical idealized “Indian” lived another day.

Still indulging the fantasy, whimsical Oneness — that other plane of consciousness — was still out there. They could get there with or without a cardboard variant of “shamanism,” but they often relied on it anyway. This despite the fact that, at that very same time, just as now, there was a well-rooted and necessary attempt by native groups to actively resist genocidal policies and practices. These are governmental, corporate, religious, and social attempts to root out the natives and their traditions. No amount of headdresses, dream catchers, and grotesque efforts to “play Indian” were going to save that generation or confront that reality. If anything, they fed into it.

For whatever reason, the sentiment didn’t die there. It just evolved.

But what enrages me most about that situation is that the sheer entitlement so often gets overlooked. Perhaps it’s just the pervasiveness of overt racism against natives, from their derogatory use as sports mascots to the constant desecration of sacred places for mining or luxury resorts, or the fact that governments and frontier industries still publicly call for the extermination of the peoples themselves, but the reality of colonialism is still fully alive.

And it has many faces.

In 1895, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the man who became superintendent of the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, declared that it was the goal of the forced residential school program: to “kill the Indian, save the man.”[xvi] In their charismatic upholding of a fantastical stereotype of native societies in the face of policies of extermination, the default of the hippies and psychedelic dreamers became “let the people die, but save the Indian.”

That might seem like an exaggeration, which underlines the point: but they meant well.

So what has that done? What has tourism done for any native society? Brought roads and all that they entail? What has a cartoonish version of their culture, reduced to their dress and ritual, done for any of them?

We arrive at this point in this story because there is maliciousness, an almost blatant insidiousness, in the will that has been granted to Woodroffe and people like him.

Again, in his own words:

I cannot stress how important it can be to retain old knowledge such as the knowledge these people have harboured in there [sic] cultural memory. It is a far more valuable resource than all the trees, minerals, and oil in the whole Amazon.[xvii]

These people have harbored.

Like a fugitive, there is a universal truth that they have access to. One that, ostensibly, we deserve. Their cultural memory is ours to mine, drill, and take away.

Had Woodroffe one ounce of decency or genuine care for the Shipibo, as a people, he would have done a little bit of homework before declaring their cultural memory a resource. If he had, he would see that they, like all Indigenous people, have always been seen as a resource. Their lives measured in value against all the trees, minerals, and oils in the Amazon and everywhere else throughout the entire world.

His statement, like the realities he thought ayahuasca would open up, was never based on an objective truth, but a self-centered urge. He wanted to heal. He wanted to be a healer. He was in Peru to save a cultural memory of a plant — one that grew thousands of miles away — from the people who still lived alongside it.

It’s hard to contain my anger, but hindsight only makes his words sting worse. “Cultural knowledge,” he states plainly, “cannot be restored once it is wiped out. It is something that takes tens of thousands of years to nurture.”

These are the words of a man who killed an onanya, a woman who wasn’t just among the most notorious healers, but also a staunch advocate for Shipibo-Konibo rights. He came to her because she had songs that she sang during the healing rituals. Sacred songs. Her songs.

And he demanded them.

She said no.

He had purchased a gun. He brought it with him. There are many sketchy details here. Many that weren’t clear. But there were witnesses. And because they too are natives, those accounts don’t seem to matter much to the colonizer’s narrative.

“I feel responsible trying to support this culture,” says Woodroffe, again speaking without any self awareness, “and retain some of their treasure in me and my family, and share it with those that wish to learn.”[xviii]

Me and my family.

He pulls the trigger. Point blank.

Twice.

Woodroffe’s friends would later say that he was the wrong man. He would never do this. This isn’t who he is. This isn’t what he is capable of. Never mind that the trips and ayahuasca seemed to make him more distant and to act a bit off. He was a father. He wanted to heal.

He could not be a murderer.

In their eyes, all the witnesses were too native to know the difference between Woodroffe and any other white guy. Never mind that his clothes had residue from the gun he shot point blank, the gun he purchased and brought with him.

He meant well.

There is no version of this story where Arévalo lives. None where Woodroffe comes to his senses and realizes the pit of history, the colonial frontier, that he is standing in as he holds a gun to an 81 year old healer. A healer that he sought out and is making demands of.

Every telling, every variant, and every fantasy of his supposed innocence: she is still dead.

After Pizarro bled the Incans dry, after exploiting them to bring him all of their precious metals, after having turned over other natives for slaves, after having cleared the land and burned their villages, he washed his hands of it all.

In his telling of the story, by the end, he was there to protect the people.

Civilization demands a specific pathology, rooted in the stunted development that domestication requires. In it, the cognitive dissonance between action and responsibility can be worlds apart. It had to be done. It might be ugly, but colonization is the reality of a civilized existence.

That is what we tell ourselves.

That is how Woodroffe, in the minds of many, gets to be the victim, if not the hero.

And Arévalo dies every time.

[i] John Mohawk, ‘In Search of Noble Ancestors’ in Christine Ward Gailey, Civilization in Crisis: Volume 1. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. Pg 34.

[ii] Dan Collyns, ‘Peru’s brutal murders renew focus on tourist boom for hallucinogenic brew.’ The Guardian, April 29, 2018.

[iii] Richard Evan Schultes, ‘Hallucinogens in the Western Hemisphere’ in Peter Furst (ed), The Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1990 [1972]. Pg 35.

[iv] Glenn Shepard, ‘Psychoactive Plants and Ethnopsychiatric Medicines of the Matsigenka.’ Journal of Pyschoactive Drugs. Volume 30, Number 4, Oct-Dec, 1998. Pg 326.

[v] Schultes, 1990. Pg 35.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Collyns, 2018.

[viii] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-on-addiction-help#/

[ix] https://templeofthewayoflight.org/tragedy-in-pucallpa-the-death-of-maestra-olivia-arevalo/

[x] https://templeofthewayoflight.org/retreats/ayahuasca-retreats/

[xi] Franklin Briceno, ‘Psychedelic tourism thrives in Peru despite recent killing.’ Chicago Tribune, June 8, 2018.

[xii] For more on this, see my essay ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ in Kevin Tucker, Gathered Remains. Salem, MO: Black and Green Press, 2018.

[xiii] Sherry L. Murphy, B.S., Jiaquan Xu, M.D., Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A., and Elizabeth Arias, Ph.D., ‘Mortality in the United States, 2017.’ NCHS Data Brief №328, November 2018.

[xiv] Don José Campos, The Shaman and Ayahuasca. Studio City, CA: Divine Arts, 2011. Pg 8.

[xv] Thomas King, The Truth About Stories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003. Pg 113.

[xvi] Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004. Pg 14.

[xvii] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-on-addiction-help#/

[xviii] Ibid.